ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Oscar Bony, The Worker’s Family, 1968 with viewers
realist tradition: elevating an everyday family to the dignity of exemplary
representation or ideal. 38 Nevertheless, the use of a ‘real’ family as models
for this task complicates such a reading: although the family are literally
and symbolically elevated, they are also subject to the scrutiny of a primarily
middle- class audience who came to view them, as installation shots
make clear: a well- to- do family of three inspect the shorter, less welldressed
family, who avert their gaze.
This double presentation of the family – on display both symbolically
(as representatives of the working class) and literally (as the singular
Rodríguez family) – was conceptually reinforced in the father’s double
pay. 39 But the family also functioned as a third type of representation – as
an avant- garde ‘experience’ or ‘experiment’, in line with the exhibition’s
title. Indeed, the critic and curator Jorge Romero Brest, director of the art
centre at the Instituto Di Tella, considered Bony’s work to be among the
‘most authentic’ of the experiences he presented at the show, along with
that of Roberto Plate. 40 Plate had contributed a simulacrum of public
conveniences, into which the public entered to find no toilets, only an
empty space – which they duly began to deface with graffiti. Counter to
Masotta’s interest in mediation and semiotics, Brest viewed many of the
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